Michael Marberry: Dan, we’re so very excited to feature three of your poems (from Romanticisms) in this Spring issue of The Journal! And such memorable, peculiar little sound-image creatures they are! Tell me: Where in the world did these particular poems come from? What inspired them, if anything, in particular? How would you describe the larger project of which these poems are a part? Am I wrong in assuming—based on the title, the tone, and the form—that there’s an homage to the great Romantic poets at work here?

Dan Beachy-Quick: The poems are an homage—and an offering and a plea and some kind of apology and maybe a repair. Well, I think of them in odd and manifold ways.

I spent most of the past year-and-a-half working on a book on John Keats—a book that might best be described as a biography of the poetic imagination. Somehow, I couldn’t start writing that book until I wrote these sonnets—of which, in total, there are fourteen. I felt as if I must apprentice myself to the form Keats did: the sonnet. I felt I must do so according to his own principles, his own strivings, and so the sonnets became a way for me to ask permission to think about Keats’s work in the ways that felt most valid to me: not to find a distance to judge from but, as Keats says about the truth of proverbs, to prove them upon my own pulse. I wrote them so as to add myself in, to participate, to diminish the distance between my mind and his—and as audacious as it sounds, I felt it an act of humility, of seeking entrance by asking to be worthy of thinking within the work of a poet I so deeply love.

It is a trespass, thinking. And to do it, perhaps one must apologize to the one being thought about. I couldn’t write the prose until I’d finished the poems. Now all are done, and the book on Keats—A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work—will appear in the University of Iowa Press’s Muse Books Series this coming fall.

MM: What was it that compelled you to write a critical study about Keats specifically, as opposed to any other poet that you could’ve conceivably written about? In writing your study, in writing these sonnets, and in the process of, as you say, diminishing the distance between Keats’s mind and your own, what new things did you discover about this long-admired poet? And what new things did you discover about yourself as an artist?

DBQ: I encountered Keats late—not until graduate school. The experience was odd—a thrill of finding myself in the presence of a poem whose beauty felt so real as to be nearly threatening but also one that came to me without—so it felt—much hope for my understanding it. Some years later, working in Chicago, I read the letters bit by bit on the train in the morning. Those letters brought back to me that initial sense of beauty’s complications by seeing Keats’s own struggle with forming a poetics that refuses to step away from beauty as some essential quality a poem works toward or works within.

When I was asked if I might write a book for the Muse Books Series, I said, simply enough: “Yes, if Keats.” I wanted to hold myself closer to his thinking, to think through it, so to speak, for myself. What I discovered was something I suspected: a poet in the deep thrall of finding a way to write poems that is never reducible to a system and yet which must offer some explanation for its own method. There is a conversation between the audacity of the poems in the midst of their nearly palpable discovery and the letters that try to comprehend what the poems have opened—and yet, at times, the letters seem foremost, and the poems take a thread of thought and weave it back into the whole vision. It is—“it” assuming we can consider the poems and letters as a single project—the most moving, humane document I know of what it is to be involved in the making of poems.

What did I discover about myself? I had no real sense of how deeply formed I am by Keats, but I am. I feel as if I were a waxen seal that wakes up to its own shape and sees so intensely that sight becomes a feeling, what it is that had pressed down upon me and shaped my thoughts in the way they’re shaped. I suppose—strange as it is to say—that from Keats I have inherited my sensibility.

MM: I’m absolutely fascinated by the aural elements of your poems in our spring issue, their undeniable and captivating sense of “voice”—which, to my mind, is a defining characteristic of your work going all the way back to Spell. And your recordings of the poems only increase my appreciation for their sonics and the care that has seemingly gone into each and every line. But I wonder: Just how important is sound and voice to you as you’re writing? Are these aspects that you focus on deliberately, or do you find them to be intuitive byproducts of your process? How important is it for us to hear these poems (or any poems) as we read them?

DBQ: Essential, I think, to read so as to hear them—and perhaps so of any poem or almost any. Gerard Manley Hopkins broke my sense apart and taught me that the music of a poem is in itself a philosophic work, a kind of faith, a trust the poem makes its own meaning, inscribed within the words of the poem but not attributable merely to any lexical sense.

I feel sometimes as if the words of the poem are only there to allow access to a kind of music that the words in their certain pattern reveal, and that the mind is distracted by these words so that the music can play itself within the mind, unfettered by reason’s rigor. Poems come to meaning in such dark ways, almost occult. They trick the intelligence with itself so another work can happen in the blind spot.

For me, music is that other work. I might call it the unconscious of the poem, informing the words it is also not reducible to. It is, I think, some quality of Keats’s “fine excess,” for the music in the poem is what exceeds the language of it, and that to me is a primary aspect of poetry’s beauty: that it exceeds itself, over-brims its own fullness, and in doing so, leaves us with the wondrous remnants in mind.

As for my own process, I write when I can hear the music in the lines—a music of ear and a music of thought—and when I can’t hear it, I don’t write. The same holds true for prose, for it has its music too.

MM: It’s very interesting to hear your thoughts about the musicality of both poetry and prose and how your own creative process is often guided and dictated by how well you can hear that music at any particular point in time. One thing that I love about your work is how it often challenges my expectations of what a poem or prose-piece can (or should) be/do and, moreover, what a poem or a prose-piece can (or should) sound like.

To what extent does the music of poetry and prose sound similar and/or different to you? In the spirit of Keats and Hopkins (two wonderful examples), who are some contemporary poets and prose writers whose music you particularly admire? Lastly, as someone who often blurs those expectations surrounding poetry and prose, at what point in your creative process do you know whether what you’re writing is (or ought to be) poetry or prose?

DBQ: In perhaps a too-quick way, I hope not glib, I want to say that poetry has a music of feeling that becomes thoughtful, and prose has a music of thought that becomes feeling. There is a kind of agonized frustration I hope each art opens up to, a point at which certainty and uncertainty confound one another and intermix. Each music, I hope, allows a reader to clarify complexity without reducing it and, in doing so, gives us not the habit of thinking but the music that complicates that habit back into actual experience.

What is the experience of the page? This question matters to me, and it matters to me that one could ask that question reading a poem or an essay I worked on. Of contemporaries, I think few poets have captured this music in the way I’m trying to describe as has Susan Howe. Lyn Hejinian’s efforts have long been a model for the joys that thinking opens. And I think poets such as Brian Teare and Pam Rehm possess a lyric sensibility of deep, genuine reach.

As for the last question, the only time intent seems to keep hold of its nature is in that distinction between poetry and prose. I seem to know which I’m working on before I sit down to begin the work—as if, I guess, the work has decided for itself what it will be.

MM: The natural world and humanity’s relationship with that natural world seem to play such a strong part in much of your work, these poems included. Would you care to comment on the role that nature (or “Nature” perhaps) plays in your poetry—thematically, philosophically, creatively?

DBQ: At the most basic level, I cannot help but feel that the world is all we have by which to imagine the world. For many years, I’ve been quite taken with Emerson’s thought that the Delphic Oracle’s know thyself was the same as the Stoic principle to study nature. Adding mystery to the equation is Heraclitus: “Nature loves to hide.”

I feel deeply this work of self-investigation as worldly discovery and vice-versa—am convinced, perhaps in naïve ways, that the microcosm and the macrocosm maintain a connection, and that perhaps the poem is one of the places in which that collision of opposites maintains its difficult integrity. In this way, I don’t know how a poem can be other than a nature poem. It’s just that nature has a different boundary than we normally accept—a boundary as hazy and inter-penetrable as any concept, a place of drift and gesture. What is there? I ask myself. There is the world.

The winner in each genre will receive a $500 prize and will have his/her work featured in the Winter 2014 print issue of The Journal. All entries will be considered for publication. This year’s contest judges are Claire Vaye Watkins (fiction), Ira Sukrungruang(nonfiction), and Aimee Nezhukumatathil (poetry).

Fiction and nonfiction entries should include one story or one essay.  Poetry entries should include 1-5 poems. Simultaneous submissions are allowed; however, submitters must notify The Journal immediately via email if their work is accepted elsewhere.

Contest entries will only be accepted via The Journal’s online Submittable submissions manager. Submitters should include their name, contact information, etc. in the Submittable submissions form. The title of the contest submission should be the title of the piece(s) submitted. Do NOT include your name or any other identifying information in the submissions title or in the manuscript itself. Submissions that fail to adhere to these guidelines will not be considered.

Each contest submission must be accompanied by a $15 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to The Journal. Multiple submissions are permitted for the contest; however, each additional submission must be accompanied by a new entry fee. Close friends, family, and former students of the judges are prohibited from entering. The contest entry deadline is now May 15.

Nick White: Where were you in your career/work when “Sketching Firestorm” came out?

Christopher Coake: I was actually living about two miles away from The Journal office when the story was published. Donald Ray Pollock and I had a similar experience, in that The Journal gave us our first professional publications—and then Michelle Herman found out our personal stories, learned that we were both aspiring and serious writers, and began trying to talk us into getting our MFAs at Ohio State. She was successful, too—so my story came out just a few months before I began the program.

I’d submitted this story to something like twelve other journals, on and off over four years. It was literally the only publishable work of fiction I’d ever produced, and I’d been clinging to it as proof to myself that I could be a writer. If The Journal hadn’t taken it, I’m not sure what my path would have been. I can say that the validation I got—and Michelle’s ongoing interest in my work—made an enormous impact on me. I could imagine quitting, before that story was accepted. Afterward I couldn’t.

NW: If you could say something to your younger writer self who wrote this piece, what would you say?

CC: “That’s a good start, buddy, but this is the last story you’re going to write for a long time, if ever, while secretly wishing you were David Foster Wallace. Now relax, go to school with a clear conscience, and figure out what you really want to say. It’ll be all right.”

NW: How does “Sketching Firestorm” compare to the work you’re currently doing/planning to do in the future?

CC: As the previous answer suggests, “Sketching Firestorm” is much more postmodernly playful than a lot of the stuff with which I’ve been successful since. One of the things I learned about myself while at Ohio State is that I’m better at portraying complex emotional states than I am at wild formal experimentation. I love that sort of thing, and my first book, We’re in Trouble, experiments a lot in terms of structure and time. Lately, though, I’ve been much more interested in simply telling a good story—which, as it turns out, isn’t so simple after all.

NW: Did you learn anything about writing/yourself as an artist while writing this piece?

CC: Yes. This was the first story I wrote that really worked, on all the levels I was aiming for. And it works that way because I finally was able to get some of my personal disturbances on the page without feeling overly beholden to my own biography. In other words, I was in that state of composition where I was in the perfect balance between control and access to the subconscious. If that makes any sense. I suppose what I’m saying is that this was the first story I wrote that felt like good writing when I was writing it—and which was then confirmed for me as good by others. This story kinda calibrated me.

NW: Has your writing changed much (or any) since writing this story? How so?

CC: I can honestly say I’ve written very little like “Sketching Firestorm” since it appeared. But it’s a story about love under threat, about the inevitable loss that comes along with love, so thematically it’s right in line with everything I’ve written since.

Silas Hansen: I was first introduced to your work when you read from Talk Thai: Adventures of Buddhist Boy at Ohio State, not long after it was published. Since then, I’ve read several of your essays, which sometimes—but not always—deal with similar subject matter about your family, your Thai heritage, and growing up in the Midwest. I even recently re-read a flash essay of yours, “Chop Suey,” from Brevity 19, and was—as I always am while reading flash nonfiction, and yours in particular—awed by your ability to write something so short that carries that much weight. Could you tell me a little bit about how you approach writing in these different forms and lengths? How does your writing process differ for a flash piece vs. a longer essay vs. a book-length memoir?

Ira Sukrungruang: First, thanks, Silas for your kind words. I’m always intrigued by a writer’s process. There are writers who guard their process like locked gems, writers like James Tate, for example, whom I had the pleasure to listen to a few years ago. When asked about his process, he couldn’t/didn’t answer the question in a coherent manner, as if giving word to his process would be like giving a thief the keys to a convertible. I respect that, though. It furthers that mythos that writing just happens, that it suddenly appears. It’s how we like to think Chopin composed his music. There are also writers like Ron Carlson or Robert Olen Butler who take us through every decision they make as writers. We get a glimpse into the writer’s mind as he writes a story, essay, poem. We get to see the product take shape step-by-step.

About my own process? Each piece of writing has its own rules for me. This might sound a bit strange, but my flash pieces and my memoir were constructed similarly. My flash pieces are exactly what the word flash implies—a flash in memory. I’m struck by an image in time. I’m haunted by it—like the image of my mother bowling in the flash piece “Chop Suey.” This haunted-ness carries me to the computer. My memoir, in many ways, is a series of constructed flashes set in chronological order. My initial drafts of Talk Thai were composed of flashes of memory. Once I wrote all the flashes down, I began with the bridges and expositional information needed to make a memoir work.

With personal essays—man—that’s tougher. I recently attended a talk by the great poet Derek Walcott. He talked about silence. He talked about how poets need to exist in this silence before a word is put to the page. I think when I write more meditative essays, I find myself in silence. I find myself meditating. I allow my mind to go in strange places. My wife Katie always knows when I’ve been writing an essay. I’m in a daze, one foot in the talking and walking world, one foot in the world in my mind.

Here’s an interesting observation: I’ve noticed my flash pieces are written in the morning, the longer essays in the afternoon, and my memoir almost exclusively in the wee hours of night. Do you think it has something to do with light?

SH: I’ve never thought about trying to write flash nonfiction in the morning—I may have to try that! On this subject of different writing processes for different types of writing, I wanted to talk for a minute about your poetry. You just had a collection—In Thailand It Is Night—published by University of Tampa Press, which I can’t wait to read. I’m always fascinated by people who can write in more than one genre (probably because I have failed so miserably at it myself). How did you come to start writing poetry? Do you see your work in one genre influencing—or maybe conversing with—your work in the other?

IS: I first explored poetry in graduate school at Ohio State. I was in my second year, and my mentor at the time, Stephen Kuusisto, taught me the lyric essay, this mix between lyric poetry and the personal essay. Suddenly, I was looking at my work not only through content, but language and the musicality of language. Language before served the purpose of story. But now language was about sound and rhythm and meter. In learning about the lyric essay, I realized that content could sometimes come second. That meaning can come from the gaps. Also, I’ve always been a visually oriented person. I loved how lyric essays looked on the page. How shape can tell readers a lot before they even ingest a word. A poem, before we even make sense of it, is a visual seduction. A poem announces itself in shape, and shape leads to language and language leads to emotional response. All of this works on the unconscious level. We do it with prose too. It’s the reason I tell my students to look at the shape of paragraphs. I tell them that before I even read a word, I flip through the pages seeing what I can learn via shape. Is a piece too blocky? Is it relying too much on exposition? Is it too short and choppy? Too much scene? Poetry taught me shape matters. But not only the shape of a paragraph, but the shape of a word, the shape our mouths make when speaking.

At a writers’ event the same year that I was introduced to the lyric essay, I won a raffle (the only raffle I’ve ever won, mind you) and the prize was not a cruise or a trip to Europe, but six volumes of poetry, which I thought I would give to my then-girlfriend who was a poet. Since we had a long distance relationship I thought I’d read one—Timothy Liu. Then I read another—Marie Howe. Then it was like a potato chip commercial…you couldn’t stop at one… or two…or three…or four. I devoured these books, and for the next three years, I read collection after collection after collection. At the same time, I thought, Why not? Why not try a poem? And I did. And it was all emo. And when it wasn’t emo, it was vague abstractions with words I now tell my students to avoid at all cost: reality, oblivion, soul. I wrote these poems in secret. I wrote them in notebooks, on bar napkins, on bathroom stall doors, on the composition textbook I was supposed to be teaching from, on my friend’s hand. I wrote poetry during office hours, in class, while talking on the phone with my mother. I was a bit poetry obsessed. Every day the mail person brought a package with a new poetry book. (I was/am so addicted to Amazon.)

But poetry started with prose. And my prose got better because of poetry. I decided my training during my time in grad school was not only to be a good creative nonfiction writer, but a good writer in general. To try my hand at all genres. To explore, to experiment. To fail and fail again. Fail better! (Love you, Beckett.)

Can I let you in on a little secret? I was writing poetry for another less artistic reason. A real self-serving reason that I’m almost too ashamed to mention. Back then I was ULTRA addicted to sending out my work to magazines. I loved literary magazines. I loved sending work out. I loved rejections. As a prose writer, I found I could submit only so much. I had three essays ready to go. Maybe two pieces of fiction. With poetry, I could submit like mad. And I did. And I’m ashamed of myself for dong so because I didn’t believe in my poetry yet, not until years later, not until well after grad school. I was writing poetry because I wanted that rush of sending work out. I seriously believed this is what writers do—they send out. No one said, “Ah, dummy, writers write. And real writers write without thought of where it will end up.”

STUDENTS OUT THERE, HEED THIS ADVICE! THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE REASON TO WRITE POETRY/TO WRITE IN GENERAL. DO NOT FOLLOW MY LEAD. DO NOT SUBMIT BAD WORK THAT YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN. DO NOT SUBMIT TO MAGAZINES TO FULFILL A STRANGE ADDICTION. SUBMIT WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN YOUR WORK AND WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY. (I’ll stop shouting now.)

Maybe this is the answer I should have given you, Silas: I began writing poetry because I married a poet. Our love talk isn’t in iambic pentameter, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was?

SH: I know that in addition to writing, and teaching, you’re also the editor of Sweet. Can you tell me a little about what you look for as an editor? What attracts you to a piece? What are your deal-breakers?

IS: That’s a hard question. If I go in looking for something, I’m not allowing myself to be surprised by a piece. One of the missions of Sweet is to publish creative nonfiction across the spectrum, from memoir to lyric essays to lists. From traditional to experimental. What first attracts me is language, language that surprises, language that perfectly fits the mood and tone of a piece. Content is always secondary. I never try to reject or accept a piece on a first read. I go to bed. And then the next day I see if the writing has stuck with me. There are times I can’t sleep because these essays are dashing around in my brain. I know then this essay needs to be published in Sweet.

SH: I love that feeling of reading something and not being able to stop thinking about it, even to sleep. That brings me to my next—and last—question: what was the last piece of published nonfiction that made you feel that way?

IS: Recently, I read Ryan Van Meter’s essay collection, If You Knew Then What I Know Now. It’s spectacular. And I just taught Lidia Yuknavitch’s essay, “Explicit Violence.” Talk about sleepless nights. Talk about a voice I can listen to for hours. Talk about words like heavily weighted punches. I left the essay in a daze.

The editors of The Journal are pleased to announce that Nezhukumatathil is serving as this year’s poetry judge for our second-annual genre contest, which will be open for submissions on April 1, 2013. Recently, she spoke with The Ohio State University MFA student David Winter about her own poetic origins, her interest in science and fable, and her balancing act between writing and motherhood.

David Winter: I’m struck by the playfulness and accessibility of your poems. As a reader, I often feel that you invite me to experience amazement and bewilderment in ways I don’t expect. What do you do to keep the experience of poetry—for yourself and your readers—new?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Thanks so much. I guess the easy (but true!) answer is that I myself have a short attention span and even though I think the cardinal sin of the poet is to bore the reader, the truth is I don’t want to bore myself. Even if I’m writing about a town or, say, a reptile I adore—I very much am always looking for ways to surprise myself and try to “make it new.” And to do that, I read and read and turn ideas over in my head or in a notebook for weeks or months at a time before I ever begin the “making” or drafting of a poem.

I’ve had to work like this since I became a mother. Gone was the real strict writing schedule like I had pre-toddlers, and usually I don’t know from day to day when exactly I’ll be able to wade my way through Legos and little cars over to my writing desk. But what helps tremendously is having a journal with scraps and starts of dozens of ideas or lines or metaphors, so I never have to start from “scratch.”

DW: I am sincerely impressed by anyone who manages to parent and write at all. There are several poems in Lucky Fish that deal with pregnancy and motherhood, and I read in another interview that you’re working on a book of poems for young people. Could you talk a little bit about how motherhood may have influenced or informed your work?

AN: I love that you asked this very good question, but it’s hard for me to come up with a solid answer because my oldest son is five and my youngest is two-and-a-half. For me, motherhood has been a joyfully slippery whirl—I feel like each day has its own specific answer, so I’ll leave it to others down the road if they want to draw comparisons to my earlier poems. But I can say that when I sit at my desk to write, there is a sense of urgency and a deeper sense of gratitude and celebration for this planet and its inhabitants. I know that my heartbeat is closer to the surface of my skin, so news about hate and violence affects me more than ever before, and I can’t help but feel sometimes that the only way I can push back against all this darkness in the world is to find ways to record instances of delight and beauty on this planet for my sons.

DW: You are a tenured professor, but I understand that you have also worked extensively with younger writers outside of academia. My own writing students have often shown me new ways of reading familiar texts and new ways of understanding my own poems. Has teaching influenced your approach to writing?

AN: Oh, most definitely! For me they are one in the same in that when I first came to poetry in college, I was also reading extensively outside of class, trying to play catch-up with my very well-read peers. In effect, I was teaching myself first, for example, how to write a sestina or villanelle, so that I could come back to workshop the next week and feel confident enough to contribute to class discussion about a classmate’s sestina when, at the time, I had only just recently taught myself how to write one.

And I always remind my students that “poems are not frogs.” That is, we’re not going to dissect them until all that is left are some unappetizing bits of skin and bone, and yet we need to at the very least check the poem’s heartbeat, see if it is as healthy as it can be, and, of course, along the way, recognize that there are several versions of what it even means to be “healthy,” to extend that froggy metaphor.

DW: I love this metaphor of the poem as a living thing that should be kept healthy rather than violently dissected. I think that many of us have trouble treating our own poems that way, even when we are able to be humane or holistic in our criticism of others’ work. Do you have any advice about revision?

AN: Ah, revision—that’s the fun part of writing for me actually. Now the drafting process is very unglamorous for me—lots of self-doubt, stops and starts, fussing over lines, stress-eating gummy bears (I’m only half-kidding)—but I think you have to push through distraction and just get it on the page, even if it means wading through the mucky swamp of doubt.

I never know when I’m going to be able to return to the desk again. At the risk of being a tad melodramatic, I confess that at the end of every draft, I’m actually physically tired, spent. But I love and live for revision! Love it. That’s where the making and shaping joy and play and music-popping-crackle metaphor-magic and the snapping off line breaks happens for me. I think that helps keep my students in check when at first they may resist looking over their poems again. I ask/tease/shame them: How can you NOT love revising poems? That’s where the magic happens!

As for specific advice—I usually start with examining the openings and closings of the poem: the first line of the poem should hook just under your skin to keep you wanting, really wanting, to read on. The last line should feel as if the hook were either yanked out or gently removed. Either way, it should smart.

DW: Both folklore and science permeate your writing, not only as content but also as formal influences. In Lucky Fish, for instance, you structure one poem as a set of magical amulets and another as a natural history, while a third seems to combine the language of an exhibition with a fable. How do science and superstition feed into your creativity, and how do they help you to make sense of the world or move through it?

AN: Great question. Myth, folklore, science, natural history—these are the subjects of books that I was drawn to for as long as I can remember. Sure, as a little girl, I devoured the usual Amelia Bedelia and Beverly Cleary books, but it was actually books on minerals and birds or shell guides that most often filled my library book bag. I also teach environmental literature, and these days I read as many science and natural history books as I possibly can, so my vocabulary and the structure of how I organize my writing has long been in place before I ever knew what it was to write a poem or essay.

I learned how to make sense of the world and my little heartbreaks and desires through a language of science and fable. It was the only way that I could find to marry all the wonder and beauty and danger that I witness in this world—though I will happily say that, when I use the diction and structure of myth and fable, I try to make it very obvious. And when I reference something from the natural world, the reader can be assured that much care has gone into researching that little factoid (like interviewing a marine biologist in person at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to learn about the exact pulse of a moon jelly, for example)—that all scientific details in my poems and essays are true and not me just waving my poetic license around.

DW: I loved what you said about “a language of science and fable” being the only way that you could marry your different experiences of the world. But a lot of people think of science and fable as being opposed to each other. For instance, part of the disagreement in our current debate over global warming is between those who base their views on scientific evidence and people whose views are shaped by very literal interpretations of scriptural stories. While I think the marriage of these two elements in your work is extremely attractive, I also wonder if you have any thoughts on this perceived conflict between science and fable?

AN: It’s such a personal thing for everyone, so I can only speak to where I’m coming from on this, but the language of science and fable in my poems is basically how I truly perceive the world. Everything from my faith and my deepest reservoirs, where love and fear and desire and spirituality reside, are all located in the tough fibers of my heart. I can’t explain any of those “big subjects” in my poems (or even in life!) by way of science or fable, but I know and believe them to be True with a capital T. How does all this fit then into my writing? I love how poet Galway Kinnell describes how Walt Whitman himself had “negative capability”:

“…a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within… A transaction seems to occur: Whitman gives whatever he flows into a presence in human consciousness, and in return, this other thing or creature gives Whitman a situation and vocabulary which enables him to see and articulate his own being in a new way.”

Isn’t that so beautiful? I think the ability to have a situation and a specific vocabulary to create a new world on the page is true to some extent for most writers, isn’t it?

DW: What is a recent book that excited you? What books have you returned to again and again?

AN: What’s recently floored me was Sharon Olds’s newest collection, Stag’s Leap, and Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, a first book that just won the Crab Orchard Prize. I return to any of Lucille Clifton’s poems again and again. Her Collected Poems from BOA sits on my writing desk right now. I always return to D’Aulaires’s Book of Greek Myths—I’ve been in love with the delicate colored pencil illustrations since I was seven or eight, and I’m not embarrassed to say that volume still brings me great joy.

DW: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions. It’s been a real pleasure to learn a little more about the roots of your poetics and the person behind the poems. In closing, I wonder if you would leave us with a few words about what first drew you to poetry? Do you remember writing your first poem or a particular moment when you first knew you were a poet?

AN: Growing up as one of the only Asian-Americans in most of my school always set me apart, always observing. But my parents fostered a sense of being grateful and amazed and wanting to always be curious about the world and its inhabitants, so I never truly felt alone. I can remember my father taking me and my younger sister on a hike in the mountains that form one edge of a ring around the Phoenix suburbs, pointing out the names of each of the various cacti and desert flowers that we encountered. We’d stop and find quartz crystals or geodes hidden on the trails: such treasures! Saguaro, ocotillo, yellowbell, shrubby bulbines, chuparosa—just try to say those names out loud without smiling. So there was never a light bulb moment for me in terms of figuring out who I was. Rather, it was in college, right inside Ohio State’s Denney Hall, where I learned there was a whole craft and study of how to clearly and musically communicate and record the world around me.

In many ways, even though I’ve just recently been promoted to full professor here at SUNY-Fredonia, I hope that I never ever stop being curious and feeling like a student on this planet. There are always insect wings and jellyfish bells to marvel over. I still need to learn the color names of glaciers—so much bounty and life that I want to record on the page.

Michael Marberry: First things first: Congratulations on winning this year’s Wheeler Prize for Poetry, awarded by The Ohio State University Press and The Journal! This is your first poetry collection, correct? Having spoken with the judge (Kathy Fagan), I know that this year’s decision was a very difficult one, as we received well over 500 manuscript submissions. What was it like to receive the good news from Kathy that you’d won the Wheeler Prize?

Corey Van Landingham: Thank you so much, Michael! This is indeed my first collection and, hopefully, not my last. As for the phone call with Kathy, it was, of course, the best phone call of my life. As soon as she said who she was, I started sweating profusely. She said her name might not mean anything to me, and I wanted to say, “Your name means everything to me!” I have no idea what I actually said to her, only that she was so kind that I was in tears and, honest to goodness, had my hand over my heart the whole conversation. After we hung up, I made the requisite phone calls, continued sweating, brushed my hair and my teeth, and blasted “A Milli” by Lil Wayne because, apparently, that seemed appropriate at the time.

What I’m trying to say is that I was so incredibly happy and honored that I had no idea what to do with myself. I am in love with Rebecca Hazelton’s gorgeous book Fair Copy, last year’s Wheeler Prize winner, and I couldn’t be happier and more humbled to be in her company at OSU Press.

MM: I’m sure that I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that titling a book seems impossibly difficult. (I have trouble giving titles to individual poems, let alone to an entire collection!) Your book is entitled Antidote, which is also the title of one of the poems therein. How did you decide on this particular manuscript title? What does the title mean to you? How do you see the title working in unison with or in tension against the poems in the collection?

CVL: Yes, this whole business is impossibly difficult. I have always struggled with titles. I think maybe one of my titles received the go-ahead during my MFA workshops, and titling my manuscript was grueling. Long titles have always captivated me—I love their inherent poetry, their rhythm, their complication—and I tried to emulate these titles that I so admired. It wasn’t until The Great Title Breakdown of 2012, as I now call it, that I realized perhaps a long, abstract title wasn’t quite right for my book. All this happened while I was in Vermont at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I must have bugged the hell out of my dear friend Brittany Cavallaro, as I rattled off title after title to her for days.

As soon as I wrote down the word “Antidote,” however, something felt right. The strange thing is that it comes from a phrase that didn’t feel particularly representative of the book: “The antidote to all those pills she was taking.” But the more I thought about the idea of an antidote, how it conjures up danger and the sinister in its unmentioned nod to poison, the interesting wording of an antidote being given against something, the more I liked it.

I actually wrote the poem “Antidote” after I found the title, and it helped solidify the various tensions the title holds for me: poetry as a possible antidote to mourning; poetry as an impossible antidote to mourning; the fact that nothing can be given against lost love or guilt or death or the myriad other incurable afflictions that we face. For a book that has so many various tones and speakers trying to approach valediction through different forms, Antidote felt like it encompassed all of them, as if each “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” and “we” was an attempted antidote against the feeling of futility.

MM: Tell me a bit about how the manuscript came together—i.e. how you selected which poems to include, how you decided on the overall organization, etc. What sort of guidance did you receive during the process of putting together the manuscript? In retrospect, was there a specific piece of advice that you received that stands out as particularly instructive, helpful, or formative for creating your book? Were there other poetry collections that influenced the construction of your own collection?

CVL: My incredible mentor at Purdue University, Donald Platt, was invaluable in the process of putting together this manuscript. One evening, we met on campus with all the poems that I wanted to include and, one by one, spread them out on a long conference table. At the time, the manuscript had three sections, and my homework was to have picked the poems that I wanted to begin and end each section. From there, we built each section from each end, moving slowly toward the middle. The physical process of standing up and seeing each poem together, of reading aloud last lines and seeing the different formal patterns of each poem next to each other helped immensely.

After I removed the sections, though, I still saw the manuscripts as being in parts—mainly because of having three poems titled “To Have & To Hold,” three poems titled “Valediction Lessons,” and three elegies. The entire time that I was working on putting together the manuscript, I wanted to avoid its becoming a project book. Don’t get me wrong: I think those can be beautiful and luminous and quite valuable. But I didn’t want it to be a dead father book or a breakup book or a surrealist self-meditation book; I wanted it to be all those things. The simultaneity and multiplicity of themes kept me interested, kept me motivated, and prevented me (I hope!) from writing the same poem again and again. But, in a way, this made the entire process of choosing poems more difficult. In the end, it came down to pairing and contrasting tonal registers and, I’ll admit, trying not to have too many couplets together. Poems that could not go into the book: anything too hopeful, anything without a fairly strong speaker or lyric voice, and anything that strayed too far from landscape or place.

I gave myself the task of reading a lot of first books by women poets, and I know that many of them have been quite influential—especially Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House, Traci Brimhall’s Rookery, Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight, and Mary Szybist’s Granted. Though it’s not a first book, the most important book for me while writing and organizing my own book has been Joanna Klink’s Raptus, though I’m sad now that I can’t have a Kiki Smith drawing as cover-art. Have you read Raptus? Go buy it. Klink is a genius when it comes to creating a collection of poetry. (You’re welcome!)

MM: Last question: What advice would you give to other poets putting together that first book manuscript?

CVL: When approaching the manuscript, allow yourself the same strangeness, intuition, danger, magic, and otherness that goes into writing a poem. Remember that you are a poet, not an architect. It should be fun. You should stand up while organizing it. You should drink wine. And you shouldn’t just do what anyone else tells you to do.

It’s nearly impossible to talk about the writing of Holly Goddard Jones without expounding upon the virtuosity of her prose. Given how she traffics so easily between interiority and action, perception and power, a critic might be tempted to stage a review of her new novel, The Next Time You See Me, as a sort of writer’s workshop on how to best use exposition and what it means to reveal a character’s personality while simultaneously increasing their mystery and allure.

Stylistically—and it must be conceded that this represents a coarse, cut-out dichotomy—writers thrive in one territory or the other: either the writer relishes in the Why of the Interior, whereby the evaluation of how a character is capable of what he or she ultimately does trumps the actual deed or misprision (Perhaps Roth, Paul Auster, or even William James could be positioned here); or the writer invests themselves in a clear and present Testimony of Events, whereby the author entrusts the reader’s imagination to speculate and attach possible motives to a corresponding action or exchange of dialogue (I think of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Hemingway). Again, rather than pigeonhole any specific author’s work, this binary aims to invite discussion and highlight the fact that Holly Goddard Jones seems to blend the two for optimum effect. Not only does the accuracy of her insight dazzle us with how she’s able to peer through everyday interactions into the deeper truths and contradictions of personality, she deftly maneuvers through the pivotal, high-stakes scenes where the major threads of her novel’s world come to a head.

Of course, these types of considerations would lead audiences to believe that Goddard Jones is a sort of writer’s writer, a literary aficionado’s delight not meant for enjoyment by the general public, but this would be an incredible misstep given how eminently readable this book is. Staged, in a sense, like a mystery or thriller, The Next Time You See Me focuses on the events surrounding the murder of Ronnie Eastman and the discovery of her remains. Indeed, if The Next Time You See Me could be used to instruct creative writing students in anything, it would be how to successfully withhold information without unfairly manipulating the reader. Though we learn very late in the novel the actual details surrounding Ronnie’s death, the revelation only confirms facts we’ve safely assumed early on in the book. What we learn isn’t the murderer’s identity, but how such a thing was possible, even inevitable, and it takes exactly three hundred and thirty pages to establish this. So, yes, you can call Holly Goddard Jones a writer’s writer and lecture about her work in creative writing classrooms, but you won’t be doing so at the expense of her readership.

As events unfold and the citizens of Roma began to wonder how such a “crazy killer” could live so unassumingly among them in their town, the reader realizes that the murderer can do so because he is a product of this community. Roma—though a fictional construction—resembles many Kentucky towns. As a native Kentuckian, I can attest to this town’s rigid social stratification. No, it doesn’t take much wealth to put you at the top of the pyramid in such a small economy, especially in the early ’90s in which this novel takes place, but if you exist on the other side of the fence—the son or daughter of a factory worker or laborer—certain opportunities begin to close their doors on you pretty quickly and, once they start, they never stop.

Perhaps, this is why Wyatt Powell—at least to this reviewer—shines brightest among the catalogue of personalities we encounter. No character—aside from Emily Houchens (a socially challenged thirteen-year-old who fantasizes about the boy who is the cruelest to her)—garners as much sympathy as this overweight underachiever. By the time we encounter Wyatt, he’s all but resigned himself to his lonely skillet breakfasts, and his dog, Boss, is his only comfort. As he meets Sarah and embarks upon the first reciprocated romantic relationship of his adult life, we find ourselves cheering for him despite the darker portents we suspect.

In Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter wrote that the task of fiction is “…to expose elements that are kept secret in a personality, so that the mask over that personality (or any system) falls either temporarily or permanently… [allowing] something of value to come up.” No statement could better assess the accomplishment of The Next Time You See Me and its approach toward the citizens of Roma. Though the masks come off from a half-dozen or so characters, the preponderance of these revelations remain private and contained, and hardly anyone comes completely clean, even to him- or herself. The bratty, yet intelligent Chris Shelton does begin to see that he has some attraction toward the geeky and sequestered Emily and that this affinity has amplified his gross mistreatment of her, but he will continue to suppress this attraction because she’s socially unacceptable as a romantic partner. Likewise, Tony (the cop assigned to Ronnie’s disappearance) does engage in an illicit affair with Ronnie’s sister, Susanna, but does so more out of convenience than to reciprocate Susanna’s genuine attraction to him, leaving her on an awkward precipice as the events of the novel close. In this way, Holly Goddard Jones manages to reveal characters while maintaining Roma’s status quo. Despite all that she drags out of the shadows, the lights in this narrow stretch of Kentucky remain pretty dim. As a writer you have to admire the vision and fidelity to life; as a reader you have to appreciate the ride.

Download audio file (Kampa-Poem.mp3)

We’re late because according to Virginia State law
the intersection of West Ox
& Bennett Road is only two deaths away
from the installation of a traffic light—great news
but no one’s volunteering: the stop sign line
stretching cautious for a mile, a single car gingering
forward at a time. My foot on the brake,
we practiced saying eight different options
for hello. Where the inflections go. To pronounce
her name with eye contact. With her shoulders
straight back, like Pocahontas—her favorite
Disney princess. To send her arm out like a paper boat
in the other direction. That Yes, I promised, they will
offer their hands too. It’s easy to say true things
without feeling any truth in them. Her kid-size
equestrian boots dirtying the dashboard, both hands
upwards on her lap as if a catalogue
of gestures for the frequently speechless, and by now
we’re so late the horses at her therapeutic riding class
were led already from the stable—Lucinda, Tess,
and Spirit fronting the pack. The noise of nails
in their feet. The puckered 6-inch scars
guttering their flanks, gashes that look worse
in person than they did in the daily paper. I read
they caught the boy who knifed them—who crept
into the barn that night, all of us left wondering
what pain is for. Not the dramatic part, the sound
of horse-skin breaking, reddening
the hay. I mean its aftermath: my sister’s face
as she’s legged-up to the saddle. Her woundedness
imagining theirs. Seconds before, she walked up
to the teacher in her sweet, robotic way. Gave her hand
like we’d rehearsed it, then joined the others
in the class. If grace could be
defined it’d be a very quiet phrase. All that braided
hair. The burdens on their backs. Each body
half on fire, the other half in flame.